Higher prices for internal services of the Ministry of Railways will hit exporters It's time to get used to the fact that all components of our economy are now more interconnected than ever. In the days of the planned economy, the problems of one industry could be easily solved "easy ...

Higher prices for internal services of the Ministry of Railways will hit exporters

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It's time to get used to the fact that all components of our economy are interconnected today as never before. In the days of the planned economy, the problems of one industry could easily be solved with a "flick of the wrist" of the country's leadership: the profits of one department were sent to cover the costs of another. Now the alignment is completely different, and His Majesty the Market is in the yard. Consequently, the state of one of the subjects of the economy will certainly affect the other.

For example, an increase in oil prices will immediately force freight carriers to raise prices for services, and, accordingly, this will affect the price of raw materials and final products. The same applies to the increase in the cost of electricity, metal products and tariffs for rail transportation. The problem of the cost of the latter is very important, because more than 80% of transportation within the country is carried out by rail. For quite some time now, there have been heated discussions in the government that the Ministry of Railways is holding too high freight rates and is profiting terribly from this. But if you don’t exaggerate, but sort it out calmly, then the problem of freight rates actually exists, but it is criminal to solve it “on the fly”, because the economic well-being of a huge number of people using the services of the railway department is at stake.

The prehistory of this problem is as follows: in our country there were and still exist two types of freight railway tariffs: domestic and export. The second one is used when the goods are shipped across Russia, but for export. Until August 1998, the difference in them was small. After the default, it increased by 4.5 times. Railway workers were asked to bring the tariffs together and introduce a single one. And you can already guess who insisted on their immediate alignment. The Ministry of Railways agreed to the rapprochement of tariffs, but set a condition: to equalize them gradually, lowering the export one and slowly raising the domestic one. According to the railroad, this will take several years, preferably 3-4 years. Aksenenko’s department took this step with obvious reluctance, because the money they earn today on the export tariff is spent by them on paying taxes, compensating for losses from passenger traffic and other “patching holes” in the budget, both their own and the state.

By the way, according to many economists, if the "high" tariff is not particularly difficult for exporting industries, then why not keep it at the same level. Moreover, neither the oil industry nor the metallurgists (the main "consumers" of the export tariff) are in the least like poor relatives: the volume of export traffic has recently increased several times, in contrast to domestic traffic.

If the cost of the domestic tariff rises sharply, in fact, this will hit the exporters themselves first of all: the cost of export products will rise significantly, since now domestic raw materials for its production are imported at cheap domestic tariffs. Well, the future is also not difficult to predict - this increase will boomerang on the country's economy as a whole and on each of us individually.

The “Regulations on the Fundamentals of State Regulation of Tariffs for Freight Rail Transportation”, recently adopted by the government of the Russian Federation, contains paragraph No. 3, which says that tariffs are regulated by the state so that railway workers have an economic incentive to reduce the cost of transportation, and transport - to increase freight traffic and improve the transport properties of goods. It is clear that a sharp convergence of tariffs will simply neutralize the meaning of this paragraph and once again lead the country's economy to a crisis situation. The working group now dealing with this issue seems to have realized the absurdity of the rush and has been reported to be increasingly leaning towards the option proposed by the IPU. Apparently, it is worth hoping that common sense will still prevail.